LOGOS

INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHYCARTESIAN CERTAINTYCogito ergo sum

A. FORMULATIONS

Descartes claims that the experience of self-consciousness
constitutes the certain epistemological foundation he had been seeking by means
of methodical doubt. This experience--certain, indubitable, and logically
necessary according to Descartes--is concisely expressed in the famous Latin
formulation, Cogito ergo sum: “I
think, therefore I am.” However, Descartes offered several formulations of the
Cogito that are instructive for
interpreting its precise meaning.
1. Discourse on
Method (1637): Part IV

But immediately I noticed that while I was trying thus to
think everything false, it was necessary that I, who was thinking this, was
something. And observing that this truth, ‘I
am thinking, therefore I exist,’ was so firm and sure that all the most
extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were incapable of shaking it, I decided
that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy
I was seeking.

2. Mediations on
First Philosophy (1641): Meditation II

Does it now follow that I too do not exist? No: if I
convinced myself of something then I certainty existed. But there is a deceiver
of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me. In
that case, I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive
me as much as he can, but he will never bring it about that I am nothing, so
long as I think I am something... So I must finally conclude that this
proposition, I am, I exist is
necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.

3. Principles of
Philosophy (1644): Part I, 7

It is not possible
for us to doubt that we exist while we are doubting; and this is the first thing
we come to know when we philosophize in an orderly way.

In rejecting—and even imagining to be false—everything
which we can in any way doubt, it is easy for us to suppose that there is no God
and no heaven, and that there are no bodies, and even that we ourselves have no
hands or feet, or indeed any body at all. But we cannot for all that suppose
that we, who are having such thoughts, are nothing. For it is a contradiction to
suppose that what thinks does not, at the very time when it is thinking, exist.
Accordingly, this piece of knowledge—I
am thinking, therefore I exist— is the first and most certain of all to
occur to anyone who philosophizes in an orderly way.

B. EXPOSITION

1. What is meant by “thought.” (PP I: 9)

2. The Cogito as
first truth in the order of knowledge, i.e., as epistemic foundation for
philosophy and sciences. It is not, however, first in the order of being
(reality); a distinction Descartes accords to God (Meditation III).

3. The Cogito
(the mediator’s certainty of his own existence) emerges as a direct result of
the systematic process of doubt (philosophizing in an orderly way) described in
Meditation I, and in particular, from the extreme scenario of a supremely
powerful deceiver (malicious demon or evil genius). As such, the very act of
radically doubting my existence, for Descartes, actually confirms it.

4. Certainty of
one’s own existence: The
qualifying clause in the Meditations’
formulation (... whenever it is put
forward by me or conceived in my mind) is significant for an accurate
conception of Cartesian certainty. The certainty of my existence generated by
the Cogito is not like the
certainty of some timeless, necessary truth of logic or mathematics. In general,
my existence is not necessary in any sense. But so long as I am actually engaged in the process of thinking, I must
exist. Hence, the certainty of the Cogito
is temporally relative to the performative
process of thinking (in the present tense: I am thinking).

5. The meaning of
“therefore” (ergo) or the link between “I am thinking” and “I
exist.”

b) Performative
implication: the certainty of my existence is not discovered on the
basis of a general, formal, syllogistic piece of reasoning. Rather, it is pragmaticallyimplied by the act of
thinking on the part of the individual mediator, who “recognizes in his own
particular case that it is impossible that he should think without existing.”
As such, the activity of thinking
presupposes existence as its necessary condition of possibility. One’s own
existence becomes self-evident through
the act of thinking.

6. Objection:
Is Descartes’ methodic doubt, despite its extravagant devices, as
radical as he claims? Does the Cogito
contain any assumptions which, to be consistent with radical doubt, should be
suspended and as such unavailable for use? In other words, is the Cogito
a genuinely presuppositionless
starting point upon which to found all consequent knowledge?